The other day my friend Marjorie and I – veterans of Seventies feminism – were talking about the fallout from the Jimmy Savile saga and how so many of the gals have taken to complaining that they were “groped” by media bosses as young women, but they didn’t “dare” to object.

How pathetic, we agreed. She remembered how delighted she had been when David Frost had admired her legs during a job interview (she got the job – and deserved it, and remains rightly proud of her shapely pins). And what was so wrong with the odd squeeze by an amiable boss back in those salad days? We scorned this whingeing form of feminism which is all about victimhood. It’s like a Victorian lament: “Oh, how could you treat a fair maiden so?” Most younger women today seem to concur, if a poll by a parenting website is to be believed, that feminism has served its time. They consider it “old-fashioned”, “not relevant” and “too aggressive towards men”.

Perhaps older feminists would say that younger women take too much for granted in this era of equality and opportunity, and are not aware of a time when a leading television chief (Sir Paul Fox, sometime controller of BBC1) could say that he wouldn’t favour appointing a woman to read the news because nobody would take her seriously if she said there was a war in Asia; or the era when the late campaigner for Women in Media, Anne Sharpley, could claim that “there were more Dimblebys than women on British TV screens”.

But it is always the case that social ideas change and move on, and a new generation is unaware of former battles. I am a child of older parents: my mother was born in 1902 and her mother had been a serious-minded schoolteacher who supported the cause of the Suffragettes. Ma thought all that fuddy-duddy feminism so dull and dreary: she embraced the flapper values of the Twenties, with cocktails and smoking and painted fingernails and crazy dances. Votes – who cares, when you can have jazz and the movies?

These cycles have always occurred in social history, and they are healthy, because one generation corrects the excesses of the one before. The younger women today who say that feminism has been “too aggressive” towards men are right (I seem to remember that I once adhered to a daft American movement called SCUM – the Society for Cutting Up Men, led by a bonkers feminist called Valerie Solanas, who subsequently tried to kill the artist Andy Warhol).

Feminism has often been hateful about men, and has missed the point that most women like men and that there is a natural sympathy between the sexes. I remember talking to an experienced lawyer who had acted in a number of rape cases: he observed that male jurors tended to feel a protective concern towards female rape victims, whereas women jurors were more likely to judge a woman’s own conduct – and dress – where consent was contested. This is anecdotal, but it rang true.

And, as younger women have perceived – in the current survey – women are also daughters, sisters, wives, lovers, mothers, and they seldom think of the men in their own families as chauvinists and rapists. Most women look on Hanna Rosin’s new book The End of Men with dismay. Who wants “the end of men”? We don’t. Great that women’s earnings have risen: but it’s a little worrying that, in the United States, the family wage has simultaneously fallen, and sometimes more than a little worrying that it now usually takes two salaries to raise a family. Where is the “choice” in that? No easy answers!

Of course, there are core values within feminism which certainly should be upheld and preserved. When we read of the case of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager shot in the head, with the express purpose of murder, by the Taliban, because she campaigned for women’s education, it is brought home to us how important it is to advance the rights and dignity of women in the developing world: how valuable education and opportunity are for women, and how vital it is that women as people should be cherished – a point also illuminated by the tragic evidence that female babies in Asia are being forcibly aborted because daughters are not esteemed. The core values of women’s education, emancipation and entitlement to respect must endure: but some of the wilder shores of Western feminism are indeed ridiculous.

Sexual exploitation, especially of the young and vulnerable, is odious and pornography is often demeaning – the late Sylvia Kristel was little admired by women, and the late Linda Lovelace was very evidently exploited. Yet that shouldn’t be a signal to reject the natural frisson between the sexes or to put aside common sense and a sense of proportion (not to mention a sense of humour) in everyday interchange. After all, most young women would like to have their legs admired. Why would they show them if they didn’t?